Methods and apparatus for automatic call routing including disambiguating routing decisions

A method of routing calls to one of a plurality of destinations comprising the steps of:

• performing a training phase to create a plurality of documents, each document being associated with a destination, and document information for use in associating a document with a query, the document information including a scoring matrix containing information usable to associate the query with one of the plurality of documents, the training phase comprising the steps of:
• creating a training corpus comprising a plurality of training documents;
• performing morphological processing to convert each training document to a morphologically processed document;
• filtering each morphologically processed document against an ignore list and a stop list to create a filtered training document;
• converting each filtered training document to a routing document;
• creating a term-document frequency matrix using the information in the routing documents;
• weighting the term-document frequency matrix to create a weighted matrix;
• copying the weighted matrix to a scoring matrix;
• resolving the scoring matrix to produce an equivalent matrix set;
• storing the equivalent matrix set in the scoring matrix:
• and
• creating scoring data from the equivalent matrix set;
• receiving a call and exchanging information with a caller, the step of receiving a call including receiving responses from the caller;
• extracting terms from the responses from the caller to create the query;
• using the query to create a pseudo-document vector;
• computing a query-document score for each document using the pseudo-document vector and the scoring matrix;
• comparing the query-document score for each document against a threshold;
• if no document meets the threshold, routing the call to an alternative routing system;
• if the score for one document meets the threshold, routing the call to the destination associated with the one document;
• and
• if the score for more than one document meets the threshold, performing disambiguation between the documents.

A call routing system for routing a call to a desired destination, comprising:

• a caller interface for conveying information to a caller and receiving caller information from the caller for use in routing of a call;
• a routing module for routing a call to a desired destination based on caller information received by the caller interface, the routing module being operative to formulate a query based on terms contained within the caller information, the routing module being further operative to determine a match between the query and one of a plurality of documents, each of the plurality of documents being associated with a destination, the routing module being operative to route the call to the destination associated with the document matching the query, the routing module being further operative to detect ambiguity in the match between the query and the one of the plurality of documents;
• a disambiguation module for disambiguating an ambiguous match between the query and one of the plurality of documents, the disambiguation module being operative to create one or more disambiguating questions to be provided to the caller through the caller interface, the disambiguation module being further operative to receive an answer to the disambiguating questions from the caller interface, the disambiguation module being operative to add information from the answer to the disambiguating questions to the query to produce a refined query, the disambiguation module being further operative to return the refined query to the routing module for use by the routing module in routing the call.

A method of routing calls to one of a plurality of destinations comprising the steps of:

• performing a training phase to create a plurality of documents, each document being associated with a destination, and document information for use in associating a document with a query, the document information including a scoring matrix containing information usable to associate the query with one of the plurality of documents;
• receiving a call and exchanging information with a caller, the step of receiving a call including receiving responses from the caller;
• extracting terms from the responses from the caller to create the query;
• using the query to create a pseudo-document vector;
• computing a query-document score for each document using the pseudo-document vector and the scoring matrix;
• comparing the query-document score for each document against a threshold;
• if no document meets the threshold, routing the call to an alternative routing system;
• if the score for one document meets the threshold, routing the call to the destination associated with the one document;
• and
• if the score for more than one document meets the threshold, performing disambiguation between the documents, disambiguation being performed by:
• creating one or more disambiguating questions to be provided to the caller;
• receiving an answer to the disambiguating questions from the caller;
• adding information from the answer to the disambiguating questions to the query to produce a refined query;
• and
• using the refined query to route the call.